Goodbye blog. I'm off for two weeks to Mexico.
Nothing happen while I'm gone.

And today, Antonioni. Michelangelo Antonioni.

Ingmar Bergman dies. He was 89.
A scene from Winter Light. Gunnar Bjornstrand had the flu the whole time they were filming.

Octopus Magazine #09

Reviews, Recovery Projects and Essays. A secret is revealed through repeated visits to the site.

"Reviews of

Paige Ackerson-Keily's In No One's Land, Geoff Bouvier's Living Room, Evan Commander's A Thing and its Ghost, Katie Degentesh's Anger Scale, Danielle Dutton's Attempts at a Life, Sandy Florian's 32 Pedals & 47 Stops, Graham Foust's Necessary Stranger, Peter Gizzi's Outernationale, Shafer Hall's Never Cry Woof, Christian Hawkey's Citizen Of, Andrew Joron's The Cry at Zero: Selected Prose, Joseph Lease's Broken World, Ben Lerner's Angle of Yaw, Mark Levine's The Wilds, Susan Maxwell's Passenger, Catherine Meng's Tonight's the Night, Eileen Myles' Sorry Tree, Geoffrey G. O'Brien's Green and Grey, Cole Swensen's The Glass Age, Sarah Vap's Dummy Fire & Jon Woodward's Rain

by

Hadara Bar-Nadav, Nathan Bartel, Claire Becker, Lily Brown, DJ Dolack, John Ebersole, Anna Eyre, Elisa Gabbert, Matt Gagnon, Heather Green, Anne Heide, Alisa Heinzmann, Dan Hoy, Melanie Hubbard, Gina Myers, Adam Peterson, Brett Price, Brandon Shimoda, Mathias Svalina & Joshua Marie Wilkinson.

Recovery projects of

Joseph Ceravolo's Transmigration Solo,
Robert Duncan's The Opening of the Field,
John Lillison's Pointy Birds and Other Pointy Creatures,
Jack Myers' I'm Amazed That You're Still Singing,
N.H. Pritchard's The Matrix & Eecchhooeess,
Stan Rice's Some Lamb
& Robert Sullivan's Star Waka.

by

Hugh Behm-Steinberg, Sommer Browning, Keith Newton,
Craig Perez, Nate Pritts, Zachary Schomburg & Amish Trivedi.

Essays by


Geoff Bouvier, Kathryn Cowles, James Engelhardt,
Ian Ganassi, Dean Gorman, Noah Eli Gordon,
Anthony Hawley, Karla Kelsey, Sam Starkweather
& Gabriel Gudding.


And design by

Denny Schmickle
http://www.dennyschmickle.com

During the month of August Octopus will be reading submissions of poetry for issue #10. Send poems in one MS Word attachment to submit@octopusmagazine.com.

Click on the ABOUT link in issue #9 for more details."

Many readings this weekend:

Friday-
Pegasus, 7:30:
Noah Eli Gordon & Andrew Joron

Saturday-
Bay Area Poetry Marathon at the Lab, 7-9 PM:
Lee Ann Brown, Anna Eyre, Kevin Killian, Erin Morrell, Stephen Ratcliffe

Back Room Live at McNally's Irish Pub, 7 PM:
Blake Ellington Larson, Vicki Hudson, Jenny Drai, Janet W. Hardy

Sunday-
New Yipes & Pegasus at 21 Grand, 7 PM:
Tao Lin, Stephanie Young, Ri Crawford

and I think there's a party with a sitar at my house.

post your favorite memory from the simpsons at the new york times . before poetry, when i was younger, the simpsons was probably my most significant interest. now it's a distant favorite memory.

but really i think these nytimes comments are getting out of control.

I think my first blog poem is finished. Should I add a word? End punctuation? Feel free to comment, and I will read your comment, and maybe I'll change my mind or maybe I won't.

I think it was a good exercise, although I had to cheat a couple of times and write three words. Also I stole your words when we were talking on the phone so you might call it collaborative, but I probably wouldn't.

Laszlo Kovacs

Here I am at the Apple store adding RAM to my parents' computer. I feel like a real computer nerd. Or just a teenager. This shopping district of Kansas City, The Country Club Plaza, is ridiculously full of touristy types from surrounding states...families oohing and aahing and shopping for back to school clothes. It used to be a more practical neighborhood with grocery stores and dry cleaners and the like. I grew up near here and my parents were always upset as more and more chain stores moved in. I think this was the first shopping mall, where one person/company owned the space and leased it to merchants. We used to come here for Thanksgiving to see the window displays with moving things and lights in the department store windows. There are some neat old Kansas City department stores still in existence, or maybe it's just Halls, but Halls is neat.

I'm now encouraging anyone in surrounding states (that includes Minnesota) to make the trip to Kansas City to see the renovation on the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. It's a really great new building, which I discussed in an earlier post. It's been written up pretty much everywhere. The photo above is from a Kiki Smith installation there, Constellation, on display through October 28th. Although I grew up blocks from the museum and took art classes there and ate lunch there and went there all the time, I had never before seen much of the museum's collection, which had been in storage due to lack of space. Now I get to see some really great abstract expressionist stuff, contemporary stuff, realism. There's an amazing American ceramics collection. There's also a super cool research library, the Spencer Art Reference library with 147,000 volumes open to the public. In the new coffee shop, all disposable containers are made of corn.

we thought grand junction was near the end,

but grand junction to denver took about twelve hours.

burned earth in nevada

angelic reading

We read the new Jubilat. We really liked the clip art postcard insert made by contributing editor Brett Fletcher Lauer, text by Dorothea Lasky (shown above). And of course the whole magazine is excellent--full of Canada, anaphora, phosphorescence. I wish I had known about the Ashbery bridge when I drove through Minneapolis a few weeks ago.

map: alaska & hawaii

map made on the train, where we learned

click to make it bigger.

The train was amazing. We didn't want to leave the train. The train didn't take me all the way to Kansas City, but I'm here now. I ate fresh, warm tomatoes and basil from my parent's garden. It's so lush, I couldn't find the arugula. There are some people in Kansas City who watch movies, and they could talk about movies every night. Talked movies deep into the cool summer morning. List of movies-to-see not currently functioning. Back to sleep; more later about the train.

Born on a Train/Fear of Trains

I'm leaving for the train. We have many books of poetry and one camera. We have snacks, including wax-wrapped cheese; we have one sleeping bag, one quilt and some other stuff.

I'll be gone for two days on the train.

Blog posts will be handwritten and photographed for later use.

Thank you,
Lily

MARY #6, an online literary journal published at Saint Mary's College of California. MARY is dedicated to publishing excellent poetry, fiction, and nonfiction by emerging and established writers. MARY #6 is edited by Graham Foust and Wesley Gibson and is largely the product of work done by graduate students at the Saint Mary’s MFA Program in Creative Writing. This issue features art, reviews, and new work and interviews from Chris Abani, Tom Barbash, Claudia Baskind, John D’Agata, Nick Flynn, Forrest Gander, Cristina Garcia, Anne Heide, Peter Orner, Bruce Smith, and many others. Check it out at: www.maryjournal.org

I like this post from Richard Lopez's blog about publishing, putting poems on blogs, and more. He says "i'm the type of reader who wants to read yr grocery lists." Often I don't want to publish, but his post is one of those things that makes me want to.

And also sometime this fall you'll get to read my poem "Moat," which I really like and which contains some of those concerns and which ends "And I begin my twenty-sixth year. / My breasts and I are supposed to like it here." (to put some of my own poetic writing on this blog) in the print issue of Tarpaulin Sky.

Obscenity

LLB takes issue with my adverb placement of "anymore" in the sentence, "Anymore I don't know anyone who lives in this neighborhood except some neighbors, whom I don't know."

I say that's totally allowed! Allowed and awesome! Please respond.

Claire: do you want to say anything?
LLB: No! you just said what I said? I said what I said. You said what i said. it's on there! .... you just want a partner in crime on this blog. i know what's going on here.

Okay, I will not delete this blog. Yet.

Off to play tennis (for half an hour).

P.S. word of the day c0-written by LLB.

This blog is not about poetry. This poetry's about a blog.

Well you have many places to find out about poetry things. I missed a day on the sidebar poem. Is Miranda July really a scientologist? As long as she's not living for the afterlife, I guess I don't care. It's cold and cloudy, windy. That's amazing for a July day. I'm reacquainting myself with my neighborhood. Walked around, saw the old bosses, saw the renovations, saw the same lake. It's nice to be in a neighborhood for three years although I've mostly been in my house. I've mostly been inside computers or other neighborhoods. Anymore I don't know anyone who lives in this neighborhood except some neighbors, whom I don't know.

my new students 2

Turns out I will have new students next year, a new class. I wanted to record the sounds of the world and make more auditory books. But I look forward to the unknown. And we'll be doing some poetry.

Oakland Art Murmur Friday 7-10.

I miss new york, miss brooklyn bridge. I am in a middle western state.

Here is the aforementioned white piece of fur. Actually this is LLB's shirt which she bought at the exact moment of my dream. By the way, I think I could reform mean fur if anyone needs help. And I did not mean offense to any cats. I don't think cats should be eaten by fur.

Les Bonnes Femmes

Les Bonnes Femmes at the Walter Reade Theatre. Claude Chabrol. 1960. Awesome. Great scene in an indoor pool in Paris. Also coats, strip clubs, confetti, braids, woods, zoo, boyfriend, stalker, and an electronics shop. Beautiful, funny, world screwed up.